Burned into my mind is the reaction to my rural town’s mayor when Flock was brought up:
“Have you seen the stop signs around here? Do you think those cameras will last any longer?”
Many of the local stop signs have at least one bullet hole in them. Armored mailboxes are commonplace. They want to put up something in the sticks that it isn’t morally ambiguous to destroy?
Armored…mailboxes? How can people suck that bad?
They aren’t shooting at them. It used to be a popular thing for teenagers to whack mailboxes from moving cars using baseball bats or similar implements. It was a bigger problem ~20 years ago.
Of course now you’re likely to break your hand/arm/bat if you try it. I’ve seen several methods used to prevent damage to mailboxes, including cages made from rebar, stacks of mobile home rims with a mailbox in the center, mailboxes made from drill pipe, the mailbox at my house is made from 1/4" thick steel plate and the post it is mounted to is a piece of I-beam. It’s bonkers. I think you could hit it with a semi truck and the truck would lose. I didn’t build it, it was there when I bought the house.
I always thought mailboxes were a weird tv thing for rural areas. Don’t you guys have letterboxes?
Usually no
We tend to put our houses in the center of our properties and often don’t have any front-yard fencing. Making the mail carriers walk all the way up to every house would be prohibitatively time consuming. Without a fence, we need to put the letterbox on a post, so we use a mailbox.
You don’t even have to be all that rural. If you have a single-family unattached home that wasn’t built in a developer plan, you’ll end up with a mailbox on a post at the road to one side of your driveway. Unless a specific location has a problem with theft, we don’t even have a locking system.
In the newer planned neighborhoods, they’ll set up cluster mailboxes.
⚠️ WARNING: P.U.I ⚠️
Letterboxes are seen in cities sometimes, but in the middle of nowhere, everyone has a mailbox by the road. Sometimes they are clustered together, a bunch of boxes in the same place so the mail carrier doesn’t have to drive a mile down some unpaved dead end road.
I like to decorate mine! Our previous one rusted out so I painted the numbers onto our new one (instead of using stickers) and then painted gold ginko leaves all over it with some bugs hiding around them.
Monument mailboxes were popular for a while when I was a kid in Florida. Someone in the neighborhood had one shaped like a manatee!
Deflock=where they are… Start mob grouping the cameras.
Has anyone here tried caulking a super strong magnet on to one of the poles? They make squeeze caulk that can do multi surface.
Could also just start taking them out? Just start throwing rocks at them and using a hammer against the boxes. Spray painting the cameras. Idk, there’s things people can do.
Make a program that’s constantly making it seem like there’s ghost devices and overload the list and it does it so much they can’t use it. Ummmmm… Let’s get creative.
A magnet alone wouldn’t do anything. You’d need an active jammer, which would be illegal. Don’t F with the FCC :)
Put a dab of caulk on the end of a dowel and touch the lens. That would at worst be vandalism, I imagine.
The messiest part would be not getting caught on one of the cameras before, during or after doing the deed.
Please for the love of God don’t do my stupid ideas. I don’t condone any of them.
The most psychopathic thing I can possibly think to do is mix liquid diarrhea from various animals with concrete mix and wear a gorilla suit and just start building shit walls around them with bricks.
Is a webpage a “tool”?
I keep hearing from US friends that their best tool was getting involved and having Flock banned from their counties and cities.
But, are they only banning Flock (which is a good step), or are they banning all ALPR installs? Can they even ban them on private property? A lot of what I see on deflock.org near me isn’t on the streets (though some is), most of them are actually looking at parking lots, many of big box stores like Lowes, random strip malls and shopping centers, a church…
Could have easily called that Flock Off
That site is just a map of Flock cams. You can detect them with a tool called Flock You
I don’t want a tool to avoid Flock cameras. I want a tool that uses my Bluetooth to turn Flock cameras into bricks.
One of those spray-can extension poles would probably work pretty well.
Need to figure out a small scale, cheap, EMP device that can be set off to fry the cameras and sensors, but nothing else that is around.
maybe some kinda really directional antenna? like a laser but for the radio range of EM
need to have line of sight and accurate aim, however
Yagi antenna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi–Uda_antenna
so that’s what they’re called
The “Nothing else around” is the hard part of that.
Agreed, though I would expect one to not be carrying anything that could be affected by such a device, whilst deploying said devices. So personal devices don’t count as needing protection AFAIC
If it’s using Bluetooth to knacker them, then all the nearby Bluetooth devices would be vulnerable.
Medical equipment these days also can feature Bluetooth for mobile connectivity, and you can’t exactly go without your defibrillator, hearing aids, or insulin pump.
Funny enough, bricks do that.
TIL bricks can assimilate other bricks like the Borg.
I would think that a simple laser-pointer pointed at the camera would be enough to damage the sensor?
Lasers would be quite risky. Anything that powerful would also instantly obliterate peoples’ vision if there’s a reflection and it gets them in the eye.
You’ll need around a 1-watt green (532nm) laser pointer. That’s gonna run you about $500 and they’re kinda dangerous.
